This time last year teachers were still trying to find their footing with distance learning. We’d been at it for a little over a month, and were just coming to terms with the idea that Covid-19 had abbreviated our in-person school year. When school started in the fall of 2020, some of us would still be needed to continue distance learning as the rest of the staff and the students would ping-pong between different learning models, depending on how the decision makers would determine which was appropriate for the pandemic conditions we were facing. I was one of those distance learning teachers.
When we started in the fall, it was with some of the same excited optimism that comes with the beginning of any new school year, when it’s all fresh and the new ideas you want to try are bountiful, and you feel ready to take on the world and make a difference for someone. (Of course some of that excitement was tempered by a virus that had already killed hundreds of thousands in our country that was still circulating through the population.) I started with thirty-three students in the first trimester. That number gradually dropped by ten as the year went on. The pandemic evolved, vaccines emerged, and opinions about learning models changed, but my distance learning class ended up sticking it out to the end.
Fall forced a new approach. The district expected more time spent online with face to face instruction and more fidelity to the curriculum than back when we had limped through the spring, when even the almighty state tests were sidelined for a year. Our distance learning team had a lot of talks about the best way to approach all of this. We put together schedules we hoped would comply with all that was expected of us, and began the experience, not knowing if it was going to last a month, or a trimester, or the whole school year.
The district created a lot of videos for us to use with our online classes. I used a few, but never got comfortable with the idea of posting a link for the kids to click and having that be how they learned. It took the organic moments of spontaneous learning out of the lesson, and frankly, I’ve always seen moments like those to be among my strengths. Besides, how was I supposed to build relationships with students if I was little more than Video Assigning Guy?
For the record, it is absolutely possible to have relationships with students you only interact with through a computer screen, and strong ones at that. The time spent online allowed me to get to know most of my students as well as I would have in the classroom. Unfortunately I can’t say that’s the case for everyone, though. Sadly, there were several who would keep their cameras and microphones off and mostly existed in our class as online avatars. Some of my students I’ll be pressed to remember three years from now, but almost everyone else, especially those who felt comfortable enough in our virtual classroom to display their personalities, I know I’ll remember.
One of my most frequent refrains this year was some version of a speech that went a little like this: “I can’t MAKE you do anything. I can’t make you come to these meetings, or keep your cameras on, or participate in discussions, or complete your assignments, or keep you in from recess if you don’t. I can give you directions that will help you learn. I can answer the questions you have. I can provide you with opportunities to practice the skills you’re developing. I can try to make your work interesting. But I can’t make you do any of it. That’s on you. If you choose to the jobs you have with school, you’ll learn. If you choose not to, you won’t. If you don’t, you won’t be as prepared when you go to middle school next year.”
That speech worked pretty well, too. By the time we reached the third trimester, my assignments had a consistent completion rate of 87%. Not perfect, but pretty darn good for teaching a class separated by dozens of square miles. I had a lot of hard workers who took their learning seriously from the first day, but I also had a lot I had lead to that point over a long six months. Somehow most of us reached a point that helped lead to personal levels of success.
I really believe the emphasis I put on creating and taking advantage of the small moments that presented themselves as opportunities for relationship building made a difference. The ones who took the meaning of my “I can’t make you do anything” speech to heart will walk away in June having experienced a positive year. The ones who lied to their families about the number of meetings they had each day, or how many assignments they needed to do? The ones who avoided the minimal steps toward self-accountability they needed to get through the year successfully? The ones who wouldn’t interact with their classmates or actively participate in their learning, or refused to complete any work until the promise of a family contact was held over their heads? Well, not every student learns the same way. Distance learning might not have been for them. I won’t be able to finish the year without feeling some deficiencies in what I did (usually the case anyway) or without wondering what else I could have tried to get them more engaged than they were and give them a better year. A sad thing about teachers is that when all is said and done, we tend to focus on the ones who didn’t reach their goals instead of the ones who did.
One unusual dynamic about distance learning has been teaching with home in the background. Sure, we get the occasional diapered two-year-old wandering into frame looking for a dance party to join, or the puppy stopping by to pull their best friend away from class because there are toys to be squeaked and balls to be thrown, or homes with phantom fire alarms beeping out low-battery warnings all winter. But when I think of the home dynamic, I’m thinking more about the adults. And I have to refer to them adults: I can’t limit myself to calling them parents, since I’ve witnessed other family members stepping in to support some of my students in the aftermath of Covid, when parents were no longer available.
There are adults who are nothing but supportive and appreciative, which is such a wonderful, invigorating relief because it’s honestly the exception to the rule. Most of the adults have been content to have a talking head on the Chromebook keeping their fifth grader busy with learning, and that’s fine since that’s mostly what school would normally be like. Meanwhile, some adults were in a version of Covid isolation that saw them just offscreen during our meets and auditing everything we were doing, then offering the benefit of real-time criticism through email when they felt it was necessary. On the flip side of that, I also noticed a few students snuggle up together on the couch with their adults when it was time for me to do read-aloud, which I absolutely loved.
You develop a lot of close relationships with people as a teacher. Many of these are with your students and some even with their families. Of course you never really become part of the family, but I think it’s fair to say that you often find yourself becoming family adjacent. Distance learning often enhanced that. I think in most cases, that’s been a positive thing.
So in conclusion, after spending over a year in a distance learning model: If the teachers are given the resources they need to meet the unusual challenges of the job, as well as the opportunity to plan and collaborate and reasonable time to do so, and the students and families involved are aware of the expectations from the beginning and have agreed to work their best toward maintaining them…then yes, distance learning can be successful. For some students, it probably gives them a better chance for success.
If the conditions were right, I think I’d be okay doing it again.
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